The exposition displays the oeuvre of Zoltan Mychka (1949-2017), a well-known Transcarpathian master, People’s Painter of Ukraine, winner of the Yosyp Bokshai and Adalbert Erdeli Prize in fine arts, Honorary Member of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine.
He left an indelible imprint on art and went down in history as a cultured, wise, and erudite person, a wonderful painter, the organizer of and participant in many plein-air sessions in Transcarpathia. Mychka’s plein-airism is a fathomless source of his inspiration and imagination. This plein-airism helped form the Transcarpathian School of painting which absorbed the experience of Adalbert Erdeli’s French and Munich plein-airism and that of the Nagybanya School. His pictures offer a space in which everyone can find their own truth.
A master of constructive nonfigurative painting, Mychka built in many of his compositions an architectonic model of imagery based on the idea of opposites. The artist also liked a monochromic pattern of painting, in which the search for form and composition boils down to the usage of white, with violet inclusions, or yellow umbers. He often used allegoric, metaphoric, and associative symbols and signs. Mychka’s nonfigurative pictures are full of high painting culture which includes bold juxtapositions of planes in the space of a canvas and the dynamic chords of certain colors against the continuous background.
The artist’s main artworks are Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1979), A Church Song (1995), Dream (1998), Balkan Dream (1999), Reminiscences (2000), et al.
“In the 21st century, the artist should be a thinker, a philosopher, and have ethnic roots,” Mychka used to say.
Zoltan Mychka’s oeuvre organically continued the traditions of the Transcarpathian School, and the master knew how to subtly express the Carpathian region’s coloring in his works. Mychka participated in many exhibits and 130 international plein-air sessions and symposiums in 28 countries. His works are now kept in museums and collections both inside and outside Ukraine.
